Chances are, if you listened to any of the coverage from Northern Ireland across the Irish and UK media yesterday, you’ll have heard some version of a sentence outlining how wonderful it is that the DUP’s concerns about Brexit have been addressed, and how Northern Ireland can get back to normal politics.
The story tends to go something like this: For too many years, Northern Ireland has been without a functional government, leaving so many vital local issues unaddressed. Now that Stormont is coming back, the parties can finally come together and work to build a better Northern Ireland by addressing the problems in health and education and so many other areas.
This is, of course, a legitimate perspective and there is likely some truth to it. There is also an incredible amount of bias in it though, towards the generic progressive and liberal position that dominates the Irish and UK media to a greater or lesser degree.
The plain facts, after all, are that Stormont has not been operational for a number of years precisely because of normal politics: In the Republic, and on the UK mainland, there has been a persistent refusal to recognise that politics is first and foremost the arbitration of competing interests: One group of people wants X, another wants Y – who should get their own way?
In the case of the DUP and indeed the wider unionist electorate, ensuring that the economic links to the UK were not severed, broken, or choked off was not some distraction from “normal politics” – it was and will remain for those people the very point of politics, and their participation in it. If the preservation of the Union was not an over-riding political objective for a large chunk of the electorate north of the border, the Unionist parties would not exist. They would have no purpose. Their purpose is, quite literally, in their name: The party led by Sir Jeffrey Donaldson is called the Democratic Unionist Party, and is not called the Democratic Northern Irish Health Service Party.
That might certainly frustrate some people, but such is the nature of democracy. One group has the power to stop another group achieving its political goals – in this case the election of a nationalist first minister – without its own goals also being addressed. What the DUP did, in refusing to offer a Government without assurances on the border was not inherently unreasonable. It was simply what political parties do. After all, the Irish Green Party did not form a Government south of the border without first extracting firm commitments on long term weather management from Mssrs Varadkar and Martin, nor were they obligated to.
The bizarre political arrangements in Northern Ireland are designed, in fact, to give political communities precisely this power: In every other democratic system in the western world, the DUP would not have had the power they used to block a Government from being formed. In normal circumstances, parties who wished to form a Government would have done so, and the DUP would have been left in opposition. Yet for all the bleating about the “spirit of the good Friday agreement”, inherent in that agreement is that power cannot be wielded in Northern Ireland without cross-community consent. That agreement actively grants both the DUP and Sinn Fein the power to block a Government from existing at all, because it recognises that both communities have vital interests that might be trampled over by the other. By refusing to enter Government, much as you might dislike the fact, the DUP was abiding by both the letter and the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement.
None of this is intended as a defence of the DUP’s position on the merits: Like most southerners, your correspondent struggles to care much one way or the other about the intricacies of customs checks in the Irish Sea. It is certainly arguable that DUP concerns reflect more a paranoia about the Union than they reflect any real or immediate threat to the Union.
None of that matters. In Northern Ireland, by dint of the very design of that state’s political structure, this is not a diversion from “normal politics”. This is normal politics, as designed and ratified in the Good Friday Agreement. The health service and education comes a distant second in that constitution, miles behind the more important principle of community consent.
In my view, this is a bad, and outdated idea. Northern Ireland would probably normalise much more quickly with a more normal constitution – one which actively encouraged cross-community governance based on policy agreement rather than identity.
Some cross-community engagement could still be required, of course: There’s no reason why we could not require a Northern Irish Government to have at least one party from either side of the aisle, allowing Sinn Fein to work with the Ulster Unionists and freeze the DUP out, if both were willing, or allowing the DUP to work with the SDLP and leave Sinn Fein in opposition, if all parties agreed.
For now, though, we have a system that grants each side a veto. And using that Veto is entirely normal, even when you disagree with the reasons for it. After all, if you agreed with the DUP’s reasons, they wouldn’t need that veto to begin with.